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It’s cool to be irreverent, to not give a shit. People say it about writers but rarely is it ever earned. With an irrepressibly ductile narrative voice that will take you literally anywhere, Diana Cage earns it here, hard. And she gives a shit, too! So much so she breaks into splotches trying to subvert or, ooops, also then revert to?? ALL existing norms. The Husbands is an education on how to be present in a world where no one is—how to sit shiva for your dad, for yourself, for capitalism, for marriage, for “monogs,” for gender, whatever. This stuff is uncomfortable. It’s MEANT to be. But what’s more present than driving up the I-5 watching your perky-titted mom dump your dad’s freshly-cremated ashes out the window? What? What?
–Jess Arndt, Large Animals

The Husbands takes a hilarious and devastating look at love and intimacy and the accompanying fear. Cage moves seamlessly through time, describing her world with addictive humor. This is funny, smart cultural critique disguised as fiction.
–Sam Feder, Kate Bornstein is a Queer & Pleasant Danger

Event by event, encountered through the critical landscape of queer feminism and the physical social fact of eternal womanhood, The Husbands accumulates into a wry, ornamental survey of ruin. Our heroine’s head is held to keen absorption; it’s too much even for she who is “striving to be Continental in affect.” Cage’s characters collect and deflect contemporary events as they love and labor with articulate coherence that is also impossible amid the absurdity of everyday life on Mars, or the suburban Bay Area.
–Rachel Levitsky, The Story of My Accident Is Ours

Andy Warhol and Aristophanes shoved through the love grindr of feminist revenge.

“Together Men Make Paradigms” is a play about our fucked up histories and how we contend with them in our daily lives. With characters drawn from the Michigan Womyn’s Music Festival, Phaedrus, and A Streetcar Named Desire, this performance emphasizes queer collage as an antidote and legacy to queer activism and camp representation. Constructing impossible historical crossroads, “Together Men Make Paradigms” cross-pollinates the picaresque with office talk and Plato with rom-coms in order to expose the operatic overtures of middle-management masculinity. With a focus on language, experimentation, and activist principles, this work fuses raw sexuality into anti-pro-masculine cos-play.

ABOUT THE ARTIST

Maxe Crandall is a 2014 Poets House Emerging Fellow. Maxe’s first chapbook, “Together Men Make Paradigms” (Portable Press @ Yo-Yo Labs) will be released at the Hot! Festival performance. Maxe’s critical and creative work can be found in, or is forthcoming in, PANK, Shampoo, Troubling the Line, and Women & Performance. By day, Maxe teaches writing in the Undergraduate Writing Program at Columbia University.

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